Projectors Guide

MiLi Power Projector-2

This article first appeared in HWM Sep 2011.

Pocket-Sized Projections

The MiLi Power Projector-2, while compact for a pico projector, won’t fit into your pocket as it’s a tad on the thick side. But its small size and mostly plastic construction makes it rather lightweight, making it an addition that you won’t even feel while carrying it around.

The Power Projector-2 has three I/O ports: a VGA port (for video input), an A/V port and an audio-out port, where you can either plug in your headphones, or use the supplied A/V cable to link up a source. There’s also the power button, another pair to adjust the volume of the built-in speakers, as well as one more that switches the output between the A/V and VGA source. A lens regulator wheel helps to keep your images in focus. Adjustments like keystone correction, however, were missing on the Power Projector-2. So if you’re going to be using it away from the office, be sure to try and find the most level surface possible on which to perch the projector.

In terms of brightness, the Power Projector-2 doesn’t quite stand out, offering a brightness of just 10 Lumens. At that brightness, you would have to use it in a dark environment in order to see the projected image clearly.

The all-black Power Projector-2 adopts a clamshell design and flips open to reveal a 30-pin connector similar to the iPod and iPhone charging cables. This more or less lets users mount any iPod touch, iPhone or iPad directly to the Power Projector, to easily share our videos and photographs.

One important point to note though is that the Power Projector doesn’t do screen mirroring when connected directly to Apple devices via the 30-pin connector. Videos will only display if you run them using the default player (so video player apps won’t show up), with the only exception that worked being YouTube. On the other hand though, video playback via VGA output had screen mirroring working just fine.

Viewing pictures individually wasn’t possible either, and we could only get the Power Projector to display them once we ran the pictures as a slideshow. What surprised us was that the built-in speakers were pretty loud and you would have no problem with sound if the video was played in a small meeting room.

In summary, the Power Projector is a handy device to have for the traveling businessperson, though its drawbacks might turn out to be dealbreakers for some.